Calling it "nonviolent communication" is a brilliant marketing move, as it implies that not conversing in this manner is violent.
I've seen this style many times in my career, and it always comes off as patronizing. It also tends to be used far more often than recommended. Instead of being deployed in difficult conversations, it gets used in every one-on-one.
My guess is that NVC ends up like power posing[1]: pop-psych that fails to replicate and continues to be espoused long after it has been shown not to work.
I think you (and probably the people adopting this form in talking to you, if it is coming across as patronizing or passive-aggressive) are mistaking the point.
This style of communication is not supposed to be a tool for more efficient (or deniable) emotional manipulation / control.
The “nonviolent communicator” is supposed to spend a lot of work up front thinking about what their real emotional needs are (which takes serious introspection, not just trivial rationalization), stripping judgment and generalization out of their observations, eliminating speculation about other people’s intent and state of mind, and coming up with requests instead of demands (in many cases those requests might be requests for additional data or possibilities), not backed by implicit threats if the request goes unmet. Ideally the non-violent communicator should be trying to drop their internal judgments and biases as well, not just leaving them unstated.
Someone who is adopting this kind of communication needs to be open to getting push-back on their comments and hearing that their demands are harming the emotional needs of the other person, open to considering alternative suggested remedies, etc.
The point is to accelerate mutual understanding of each-others’ feelings, promote empathy, and come up with some kind of outcome which is acceptable to both parties.
>This style of communication is not supposed to be a tool for more efficient emotional manipulation / control.
In corporate environments, at least, "I feel [blah]" is a formula for manipulation and control. It allows people to make demands without ever acknowledging that they are making demands. It becomes a form of doublespeak. For example, "I feel frustrated and I need commitment to the project" means "start working overtime". Except now no one can say they're being asked to work overtime. And they can't even discuss working overtime, because it's phrased in terms of values and emotions. Suddenly saying "I will not be effective when working overtime" becomes an attack on other people's feeling and shared values, because the original demand is phrased in such terms.
This is not non-violent communication. If the subtext is “figure out what unstated thing I want you to do and then do it or I will fire you”, then that is quite violent. Making both the demand and the threat explicit would probably be better.
I think you're overloading the word "violent".
What you really mean is "coercive" which, interestingly enough, is the blindspot of the ideology extolled by the OP's article.
I am not an expert in NVC, but my understanding is that avoiding unintentionally coercive language is one of the chief goals. I certainly wouldn’t claim that its title is rhetorically neutral.
Picking apart the fine distinctions between violence and coercion is something I’m happy to leave to the philosophers.
> It allows people to make demands without ever acknowledging that they are making demands.
Oh for sure, if someone wants to use NVC-style language to make demands or manipulate people, there's nothing stopping them. People are too clever to stop them from hurting each other just by restricting them to certain words.
But if someone is coming across as manipulative despite their best intentions, and wants help with that, I think NVC has a lot of helpful things to say. The distinction between a "request" and a "demand" is very clear: A request is when it's ok for the person to tell you no, and a demand is when it not. That's not always easy to communicate with 100% clarity, but I think you can get a lot of work done by asking yourself (before you start making a request to someone else) "am I actually ok with them telling me no here?" Often we're not ok with no, and no matter what language we use to make the demand then, the demanded-ness of it is going to come across.
NVC perhaps is often employed in situations that don't quite require that degree of formulation, but when parties have been bickering so much that even simple "Hello" courtesies get interpreted as passive aggression, the structure of NVC allows the building of communication.
Anything that gets and keeps both parties talking in these situations, even by marginal degrees, is worth everything.
Soon after reading the Nonviolent Communication book, I searched for more on the internet, and found the community joking about precisely this aspect of the name: https://anvc.svenhartenstein.de/en/26/
The problem with “power-posing” was that it made specific (and incredible) claims about the results of using it. I have not seen so much in the book (or if I did I ignored it), and regardless of whether it has any effect on others or not, I've found it valuable in my own mind to have mental clarity, separating observation from evaluation, thoughts from feelings, requests from demands, and simply being aware. (Even if I don't change a word I'd say... actually I can't get myself to speak that way often as it feels unnatural, so I'm content with simply saying whatever sounds natural but with these distinctions in mind.)
There are definitely superficial similarities with a “patronizing” style or a manipulative one. Nevertheless, I do think that, genuinely done, it's more than a “style” of communication, and one for every conversation where there's any emotion involved (not just difficult ones): I see it not as a strategy or technique, but as a reminder that the person I'm communicating with is a real human being with needs — the goal is a greater connection between people, not being more effective at getting what you want (for which I suspect many of the same principles may apply, but employed merely as tricks).
Of course I only remember/manage to put it in practice a small fraction of the time, and I don't know whether the “effectiveness” of such conversations is positive or negative (in terms of outcomes), but I definitely feel fewer negative emotions and that's valuable in itself (to me).
I think there's a (small) subset of people who can pull it (NVC) off but it requires them to have had the empathy in the first place. You can't just manufacture empathy in a way where it passes the sniff test.
As an example, a quick Google search just now for "nonviolent communication empathy" turns up an article from 2011 at the "Center for Non-Violent Communication" titled "How to DO empathy." I couldn't possibly roll my eyes harder. It's a failed premise from the jump. It's like an ask I recently had at work, "We need to DO machine learning," says the CEO, "because all of our competitors are [putting it on their slide decks]."
I notice the same behaviors in people who read Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and think that it's an instruction manual. It comes off as insincere and it instantly sours me to further communications with the person.
So true. I agree that you can't pull it out of a hat or learn it from reading a blog post. But, I believe it is learnable. I've gone from being a person who had no words for my emotions because I literally could not feel them most of the time, to being able to really bring heart and mind together and really speak from that place. I didn't learn it from a self-help book though, I learned it through practice and a lot of personal work, and I was lucky to have some very good guidance along the way.
> So true. [...] But, [I disagree]
Help me out here, is this the power of NVC?
Hmmm... I may have been better off with "and" instead of "but" here, because I was agreeing with the parent comment and adding my own encouragement. scruple took no clear stance in the original comment on whether empathy is learnable or not. I believe it is.
I didn't intend to imply that it can't be learned, I also think that it can be. My argument is with folks who think that things like NVC are a process they can apply by following a series of steps.
In general I'm also not a fan of changing definitions of words for the extra pathos and marketability. I also would be surprised if Rosenberg has any sort of malicious intent here in his choice of wording.
Violence is, by definition, physical, and claiming that "speech is violence" seems like a trivialization of actual physical violence.
While there is evidence that certain types of psychological abuse can cause a physical reaction akin to that experienced by victims of physical violence, those cases are extremely rare and shouldn't be used as justification for this sort of rebranding.
Emotional manipulation is absolutely violence. Often language which is itself not explicitly violent is backed by implicit threats of violence. Labeling and judgment feed both emotional and physical violence, not only among individuals but also more systematically.
The most brilliant book I know about this is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which explores in great depth the myriad ways in which language is violent and perpetuates violence, while being narrated by a completely dispassionate narrator who sticks to pure observation.
> [...] can cause a physical reaction akin to that experienced by victims of physical violence, those cases are extremely rare
If by “extremely rare” you mean experienced by nearly everyone occasionally throughout their lives (and by many on a daily basis), then sure.
An attack doesn’t need to leave someone hospitalized to be “violent”.
Discussions of NVC are often frustrating for that reason - there's a tool for difficult conversations, but we focus more on labeling than on teaching the tool. As a society, we need more mutual understanding. Setting aside definition debates would be helpful.
It's kind of ironic—for a style of communication designed to avoid statements with embedded accusations and controversial judgments, its name embeds one of the most accusatory and controversial judgments one can make. I wonder what was going through Rosenberg's head when he chose the name.
I figured out I could autocorrect it in my head to "nonvolatile communication", which seems significantly better.
"While there is evidence that certain types of psychological abuse can cause a physical reaction akin to that experienced by victims of physical violence, those cases are extremely rare"
Is this actually true? I was under the impression that trauma quite often results in physical responses afterwards regardless of source. eg. panic attacks, night terrors.
Trauma generally involves either violence, or the credible threat of violence. The three greatest factors underlying trauma are the fear of imminnat death or grievous injury, and/or the loss of control and resulting sense of helplessness, and a destruction of bedrock assumptions such as “I am a good person” or “I’m safe at home.”
It’s not common for PTSD to emerge in the context of purely psychological abuse, although it does happen. Almost inevitably abuse resulting in PTSD has a component of either physical harm, or the threat of physical harm (including witnessing violence or threats of violence).
I know lots of people who had panic attacks in response to emotional abuse with no physical violence involved.
Probably not rising to the level of a PTSD diagnosis though.
One could argue that violence is, etymologically, purely psychological: it means transgressing one's intent or will. Harm would be the word for physical stuff.
The current definition in Merriam-Webster is pretty much the opposite.
Harm: physical or mental damage.
Violence: the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy.
Violence is about violation.
You may be right, but don't ignore the fact that nonviolent communication has been around for more than 50 years. Power posing was discredited within a decade.
Also, nobody is really arguing that "power posing" can't make someone feel better, if they're disposed to use it as a way to feel better. What was discredited is the idea that it had measurable chemical effects on the body.
NVC is a suggestion, like a style of doing things, not a scientific theory.
Miscommunication and misunderstanding is the norm. NVC is just another technology. Use it or don't.
At the very least, if someone is patronizing you, being aware of the technique(s) will help you extract yourself from the situation quicker.
Great point about the marketing angle; even just using its name implies that you agree with its premises.
One can be non-violent, and coercive. That’s how passive aggression works. Sometimes it’s not angry words but the nicest, prettiest words which can get inside a persons head and destroy them.
Spot on. In the 1970s pop-psych was "Neuro-Linguistic Programming" (NLP) [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
sounds like a personal problem